May 19
After the relative quiet of the last few months, it seems like everyone is ready to celebrate the arrival of summer or at least have a glass of Rioja. From now until May 27th, 25 restaurants in both New York and Chicago will be offering special lunch and dinner menus for Rioja Restaurant Week. Lately it feels like restaurant week year around but it’s definitely worth visiting one, or two or three…Click here for a list of participating restaurants. Read more
May 4
I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate my 200th post than with a game of dominoes. Growing up Cuban, we loved playing dominoes when we were kids. Our grandparents were happy to have us quiet and entertained for a couple of hours and we were happy to swirl the clacking tiles around the table, dunking oreos in milk between matches, and enjoying the late of hours of a Sunday afternoon. Then we got older and everything changed. Read more
Apr 14
A few weeks ago, a friend gave me a list of Puerto Rican classics to try that included asopao de pollo. As she described it, it’s a Puerto Rican risotto that’s not quite soup and not quite stew. My soups often go to gumbo by mistake so I was curious to know what would happen if I made it that way by design. At Jennifer’s suggestion, I checked my Puerto Rican Cookery book first. I realized after additional searches that there were thousands of recipes for asopao, a one-pot, comfort food solution for family dinners and leftovers. After reading them over, I finally circled back to Carmen Aboy Valldejuli. Read more
In the two years since it opened, the Brooklyn Flea has gone from a neighborhood novelty to something that I look forward to each year. I knew it would be crowded but made a plan to meet a friend there when it re-opened its outdoor location in Fort Greene’s Bishop Laughlin Memorial High School this weekend. Slowly working our way through the aisles, I always go with the same hope, that the stands will be full of new (to market) retro kitchen gadgets and that the Red Hook Vendors will be there selling pupusas, tamales, grilled corn sprinkled with chile, and agua fresca. Read more
Mar 17
In 1992, salsa out-sold ketchup in the United States. I’ve heard that statistic for years, referenced it a few times, and read it again in Julia Moskin’s “Rediscovering Salsa, the Soul of Mexico in a Bowl” in this week’s Dining & Wine section. By now, most Latinos in the United States have claimed salsa’s success as our own. I have friends who’ve worked it into sales pitches and if anyone brings it up around the chip bowl, Mexican or not, we nod knowingly. Yet I’m not sure what kind of legitimacy we feel this confers on Latino cuisine or the growing market for Latino products. What does it say about us? What does it say about them? What does it say about ketchup? With so much baggage, it was great to read an article about salsa that was just that.
Mar 15
After years of winding my way through the streets of lower Manhattan, I think I’ve finally figured out Chinatown. A little overwhelming and often confusing, you always know you’re in New York. A few blocks in any direction and you’re in Little Italy, Tribeca or the Lower East Side. I’d always been curious about the “other” Chinatown – the one they keep in Flushing, where Jennifer 8 Lee said the “real” Chinese restaurants were. I had no good reason for not making it out there until now so when my teacher, Steven Shaw planned an excursion for his current food blogging class, I had to sign up. After all, he’d written the book. This weekend we met up at the French Culinary Institute on a gray day to make our way through cast iron Soho to Spring street where a 6 would get us to the 7 to Flushing. When we came up from the station, it was clear we were not in Manhattan anymore.
If you’d asked me about performance art a few months ago, I wouldn’t have had a very strong opinion. While I keep an open mind, I’ve always preferred the Met to P.S.1 and masters painting infantas to hipsters painting each other. That changed when I went to the opening of Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary at the Neuberger Museum of Art until April 11. I’d always heard about her pieces from friends, but it was incredible to experience twenty years of the artist’s work simultaneously. Featuring multiple performances of her work, I saw walls lined with tea packets in “Poetic Justice” (2002-3), was blinded by klieg lights in “Untitled (Kassel, 2002)”, and had my heart broken by the stench of sugar cane in “Untitled (Havana, 2000)”.
Inspired by Tania and anxious to see more, I went to a members preview of Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present opening at tomorrow at MoMA and running until May 31. Aptly named, she will be present and sitting in the museum’s atrium for 716 hours and thirty minutes at a table with an empty chair. Visitors are invited to wait in line to sit across from her for any length of time. In the galleries, actors trained by the artist recreate her most famous pieces while small screens play video footage of the original works. While many focused on her ability to endure, I was more impressed her perfect concentration and well…presence in everything she did. I couldn’t help but think of all the devices – books, magazine, iPhones, iPods – I use to make me feel that I’m not where Read more
Mar 3
A couple of weeks ago, I attended a talk at my Brooklyn’s Book Court between Thomas Keller and Peter Kaminsky. Though technically about Keller’s latest cookbook, Ad Hoc at Home, it wasn’t strictly about food and cooking. From process and baseball analogies, he got to ritual and repetition and I realized what I’d been missing. Trying to post regularly, I’d become sharkish, cooking in constant motion. I’ve gotten used to being just a few clicks away from French-Italian-Regional-Seasonal-Indian-Mexican-Caribbean. It’s tempting to jump from one to the other, trying everything once then moving on. Having set out to write about traditional food in a new medium, I forget that the best part can be going back, trying again, and making it a little better. I had ritual, but my repetition was lacking. Read more
If you ask Miamians for their favorite sandwich counter, they’ll often mention the Latin American Cafeteria on Coral Way. The fact that it’s been closed for almost a decade doesn’t seem to have diminished its popularity. While researching the Cuban sandwich, I had to deliver the sad news to friends that the original Latin American no longer existed. People were so surprised that I had to wonder how many of us had driven down Coral Way and projected the giant arches and wrap-around counter onto the generic Sergio’s franchise that had taken its place. Though there are still eponymous Latin American locations throughout the city, it’s just not the same. There are many contenders for second, but it’s only what someone will settle for when they can’t get what they really want. Read more
Feb 15
Like most people, I’ve been overwhelmed by the perfect storm of holidays we’ve had this weekend. Being stared down by Cupid, I could barely make out the Metal Tiger and Abe Lincoln standing behind him. Throw my birthday into the mix and I barely have enough time to get my guilt in order before Ash Wednesday. Nevertheless, I wanted to commemorate the Chinese New Year in some small way. When I first came to New York for school, Chinese-Cuban restaurants were my link to authentic Cuban food. Chinese staff speaking hyper-speed Caribbean Spanish serving roast pork with bean curd or fried rice with maduros over Cuban map placemats. I realized this winter that the reverse was also true. When I was considering buying some heavy tropical fruit to bring back with me from Miami, I realized I’d be better off looking for the same items closer to home in Chinatown. Read more
Finalist for the 2015 James Beard Foundation Award in the International Cookbook Category for The Cuban Table
hungry sofia 